Marketers spend a huge amount of effort (and money) driving users to their website, but we continue to see a worryingly high number of sites that aren’t fully optimised to convert.
Why drive traffic if it’s not going to convert?
That’s where conversion optimisation comes in. By giving your site visitors the best possible chance of taking the desired action, you can maximise your marketing budget by reducing your cost-per-acquisition and positioning spend where it has the greatest impact.
Of course, it can be difficult to know where to start. Every year there’s a growing number of tools available to help you with website optimisation.
Below, we’ll talk you through the five best conversion optimisation tools used by the SearchStar team when helping our clients achieve their business goals.
BrowserStack
When building a website, how you see the site isn’t always how the user sees it. This is down to a number of different factors; the user having a different operating system, browser, screen resolution, device etc...
Google have recently stated that 40% of online purchases now happen on mobile, making it more important than ever to ensure your site is working well across all devices.
BrowserStack is an easy-to-use and affordable cross-device testing solution that lets you easily ensure that your site is working on (almost) any browser/device combination and works in any web browser.
The process starts by looking at the devices report in Google Analytics to identify devices that are underperforming due to visual or technical issues. BrowserStack then lets us see what the user of any given device would see, enabling us to make sure the site performs as it should.
We’ve previously used findings from BrowserStack to make significant changes to sites so they perform well across devices. For instance, one client had an overlay form with a submit button that was too far down to be seen on desktop devices.
This was first identified as a potential issue after looking at Google Analytics data, which showed lower conversion rates on devices with lower resolutions. BrowserStack helped us confirm our suspicions and meant we could advise our client to change how their form behaved.
GetSiteControl
Using pop-ups and overlays is an effective way of driving your users to complete specific actions. GetSiteControl enables you to do just that, allowing you to target users with focussed messaging based on user behaviour, device type and how they arrived at your website.
Widgets can be displayed as different sizes. For example, you can use a promo pop up in the middle of the screen to really get a user’s attention or a share widget in the corner of the screen to ensure you don’t impact the user’s experience.
We’ve used the ‘Promo widget’ to highlight special offers on product pages, related content on article pages and even drive sign ups to our own SearchStar conference! The survey widget can be used to collect feedback on your site or find out more about your users. Social media widgets can be used to encourage users to share your content or follow your social pages.
Web.dev
Google claims that 53% of mobile users will leave a site which takes more than 3 seconds to load. Therefore, it’s essential that your pages load quickly to avoid this drop off.
Web.dev, which uses the lighthouse tool previously only available through the Chrome DevTool Audits panel, scores your site out of 100 in four areas – Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices & SEO. The metrics in the performance section of the report are useful for evaluating and improving site speed.
Not only does the tool show you how well your site performs, it also shows you areas for improvement and how you can make changes. This is a great starting point when it comes to site speed and we often combine this information with a variety of other tools to then make a more comprehensive plan of action.
Hotjar
Hotjar is a fantastic tool for tracking user behaviour and gathering user feedback about your site. Hotjar’s behaviour tools include heatmaps, session recordings and conversion funnels.
Hotjar’s click, move and scroll heatmaps let you visualise aggregated user behaviour data, which can be used alongside individual session recordings to gain a deeper understanding of user behaviour. You can even recruit users from your own site for user testing by offering them incentives such as Amazon vouchers.
Feedback polls and surveys allow you to get feedback from your users, and great targeting options let you ask the right questions to the right users. We often use polls to easily uncover user pain points and improve messaging at specific points in the user journey.
UsabilityHub’s Five Second Test
It takes about a twentieth of a second for a user to form an opinion about your website – this means if you’re not making a good first impression, users will leave before you can show them how great your product or service is.
Ever wanted to know what a user’s first response to your site is? The more we work with a site, the further our experience gets from that of someone who’s never seen your site before.
The Five Second Test offers incredible insights about your page’s UI, visual hierarchy, design and what aspects are easy to recall. If it’s not immediately obvious what a user should do on a site, this will significantly negatively impact conversion rate. The Five Second Test is one of the easiest ways to diagnose this issue.
UsabilityHub’s targeting allows you to quickly find testers of a specific demographic to carry out your test, filtering them by age, technical proficiency and level of education. This means you can ensure that the testers mirror your own users to gain more accurate and useful results.
Here we’ve only touched on the top 5 tools used in our Conversion Optimisation process here at SearchStar. There are many, many more out there - we’re always available to chat if you’d like to discuss, in greater detail, the Conversion Optimisation opportunities available to you and your business.
